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Before I get started here, I want you to know that I am an avid Yelp user. I like to check out some opinions about a restaurant before I head in (many times, not all the time) and I read both positive and negative reviews. That being said, I never rely 100 percent on those reviews because there are just too many unknown details. Plus, not for nothing, but some people are just outrageously picky and ignorant about how a restaurant really works. Anyway, I’ve had several discussions on this topic lately so I want to touch on it a bit today. Part of me wants to say “Screw Yelp, never use it,” but the realistic part of me has settled on “Go ahead and use Yelp, but make sure you’re being smart about it.”

Have you ever seen the movie “Chef?” It’s fantastic but that’s not the point. There is a scene in there in which a popular food critic tears apart the head chef of a restaurant for the menu he served. I could dissect this scene all day but I want to focus on one aspect. The critic makes a statement that the chef “wasn’t brave enough” to undercook his chocolate molten lava cake so that the inside was gooey. Many people would take this as a fair criticism. However, there’s a major flaw. The critic is wrong. A molten lava cake is not an undercooked cake. It’s a cake baked with a dollop of ganache in the center. It is the chocolate ganache center that makes the cake molten. Not undercooking. A good chef would never serve an undercooked cake. There are health hazards there. My point is this: Food critics don’t know everything about cooking. And most Yelpers know even less. You can’t just trust an unsatisfied customer’s critique of a menu.

Next, do me a favor and check the date of the review you’re reading. I assumed that Yelp reviews would be posted in reverse chronological order – you know, the most recent being the first one. Not the case. In fact, you could potentially read a horrible review from six months ago before getting to a rave review from two hours ago. Crazy, right? I think so. Why do I care about an issue that happened six months ago if the rest of the reviews that are more recent are incredible? It makes no sense.

Lastly (for now), I want you to remember that every story has three sides:

1. The customer’s
2. The staff’s
3. The truth

I’m not saying that a bad review is a full-blown lie. But I’m saying that you just don’t know how the experience actually went down unless you were there. And I only say this because I’ve been on the restaurant side when a negative review was posted about the service I provided. A customer ordered one of the most popular items on the menu, a cream based seafood soup, and when I brought it to her, she insisted that it was the wrong item because she “knew” the soup should have a pink color to it. Now, I am more than willing to admit when I am wrong but in this particular case, I was not. The soup in question had been made the same way for twenty years and I know this because my father invented it and I was serving it in his restaurant. I went over the ingredients with the customer, discussed other soups that sounded like the one she was requesting, and offered to replace her order. She insisted that she ordered the right soup and that the kitchen staff had changed the recipe. We went calmly back and forth for a bit trying to work out a solution until she eventually waived me off and whispered to her friends that I was “going to be serving tables for life.” Nice. Don’t even get me started on how bogus the negative stigma around restaurant jobs is. As a gesture of good will, I took her soup off the check. She didn’t say another word about it and even tipped pretty generously. It wasn’t until the next day that my manager told me about a nasty email he had received from that customer with a link to a very nasty Yelp review about how I was trying to make her look foolish in front of her friends and that I had minimal knowledge about the menu I was serving. Can you FEEL my eyes rolling?

Look. I already told you that I use Yelp myself. We are in an age of technology and information overload so it’s hard to ignore all the resources out there. Just please take it all with a grain of salt. Look at the restaurant’s website. Check out their social media. Actually, physically, go there! Nothing will give you a better idea of what the food and service is than actually trying it.

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Rebecca McKinney

I was born a foodie. My dad is a chef, baker, and restaurant owner and my mom might as well be because she owns whatever kitchen she walks into. I grew up working in my family’s restaurant and bakery in Pawling, New York – McKinney and Doyle. I started behind the bakery counter at 12 years old after begging my parents to let me start working. At 16 I worked as a hostess. By 18 I was serving tables and training behind the bar where I then worked every other weekend throughout my college career. Even now, when I am visiting my family in New York, I help out where I’m needed. To make a long story short, the food and restaurant industry has been my life for as long as I can remember.

I wanted to create this blog for a few reasons. First and foremost, to share tips, tricks, and knowledge about the food and beverage industry in general but also to help people see a different side of the restaurant world. Every restaurant has a totally unique culture and world within it. I want to help open people’s eyes to more than how fast the service is or how easy or hard it is to secure a reservation.

So, thanks for stopping by! I welcome your ideas, input, and feedback and hope you enjoy!

Eat well & travel often,

Becky McKinney

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